Vermont advocates want to bring back the catamount, last documented in the state in the 19th century. Rhode Islanders have been spotting more bobcats in the wild in the past year — reports are now in the 1,500 range. A driver in New Hampshire tried to rescue a bobcat hit by a vehicle, and later reported “a spicy woods cat” to police when it came to in the car.
I’ve learned all this and more from readers in the days since I wrote about seeing a cat in my yard and wondering if it was a mountain lion — also known as a catamount, cougar, panther, or puma.
The New England catamount is actually considered extinct. The last confirmed sighting was in Maine in 1938, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service removed the eastern puma from the federal endangered species list, due to extinction, in 2018.
But the emails keep coming, from Massachusetts to Maine. Some subject lines jump out: “I definitely saw one.” “No mountain lions in Mass? Hah!” I’ve heard from readers insisting they — or someone they know — have seen cougars here, though state officials and scientists say the bobcat is the only known wildcat in the state. Jeff Kaufman, a retired surgeon, recalled doing “kitchen-floor surgery” on a sheep attacked by a bobcat at the farm of a nurse colleague in Conway. “So she knew bobcats,” he said. “She also encountered footprint evidence of a much larger cat on her property, a print the size of her hand, clearly not that of a bobcat.”
Some readers also wrote in about the “coywolf,” a cross between a western coyote and an eastern wolf — perhaps a topic for another time. Mostly, though, you sent in photos of bobcats: frolicking, slinking, stalking, and staring at the camera. I also saw the occasional photo of a bobcat misidentified as a mountain lion. Two words: face ruff. Bobcats have it, mountain lions don’t.
As to why so many people are seeing “ghost” mountain lions in Massachusetts, I heard a few theories. Sarah Van Arsdale, who wrote the book-length poem “Catamount,” which captures humanity’s fascination with the apex predator, suggested recent reported sightings might have to do with “a deeper longing” to connect with wild things in our technological age. “It’s totally understandable,” she said, “because we’re so divorced from the natural world, living in cities and immersing ourselves in the internet every day.”
Artificial intelligence is only confusing people more, said Kathleen Carroll, an assistant professor at the University of Rhode Island who leads the Rhode Island Bobcat Project, which uses cameras, GPS collars, and citizen science to track the state’s bobcats. One local resident recently called the police to report a mountain lion after asking AI to identify a photo of a mysterious cat. Instead of helping, AI catastrophized, she said: “It was like, ‘Seek shelter immediately! Call law enforcement!’”
The cougar, it turned out, was actually an orange tabby.
Listen, I’m not judging. Along with my parents, my husband and I once thought we were on the trail of a rare Florida panther in the Everglades, when we were actually stalking a stray dog. We wanted to believe, to experience awe — and, very briefly, we did. We just didn’t see what we thought we saw.
“I suspect one reason so many people think they’re seeing mountain lions is because they know they’re missing from the ecosystem and they belong here,” said Glenn Hurowitz, founder and chief executive of the environmental nonprofit Mighty Earth.
I interviewed Hurowitz and Renee Seacor, the organization’s rewilding director in the Northeast, who helps lead “Catamount Conversations” around the state. The eastern cougar is “culturally iconic” for Vermonters, she said, noting that it’s the official mascot of the University of Vermont. Middlebury roots for the Panthers.
Vermont is also home to the Catamount Trail, a catamount license plate, and a Catamount IPA. But it hasn’t been home to an actual catamount since 1881, when, as the story goes, a boy noticed tracks in the snow and followed them to their source: a very large panther. A hunter shot the catamount and posed behind it in a now-famous photograph.
Now, 145 years later, there’s a new effort to bring cougars back to the Northeast. A bill proposing to study the scientific feasibility of reintroducing the catamount to the Green Mountain State died in committee, but Seacor said she expects it to resurface next year. Hurowitz said he’s hopeful the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department will see “bipartisan support inside and outside the Legislature is not going away.”
Hurowitz noted that forest restoration has helped beavers, turkeys, and white-tail deer “come roaring back” to the Northeast. “This great continental rewilding is something to be celebrated,” he said, “but it’s missing the capstone.” He argues that cougars could make both forests and humans healthier since they would reduce deer populations, thereby reducing tick-borne diseases like Lyme and Alpha Gal.
I have to say, as much as I worry about ticks, I might worry even more about running into a cougar in Vermont. Restoring carnivorous predators to the top of the regional food chain could be socially problematic to say the least, said Carroll, the bobcat tracker, and Christopher Hickling, the project’s lead graduate student, who also has a background in pumas.
There are more people now compared to 200 years ago, not to mention pets, livestock, and other magnets for potential conflict between humans and mountain lions. While fatal encounters are very rare, they’re not unheard of, and the risk can go both ways. In 2019, a Colorado jogger killed a young cougar that attacked him on a trail and later recounted the experience. First he heard the rustling of pine needles, then “I was bummed out to see a mountain lion,” he said.
The thing about mountain lions, said Carroll, is that “they’re not going to stay where you put them — nothing ever does — so you can’t be like, ‘I’m gonna put a puma in Vermont and that puma is never going to go anywhere else.’”
Unlike coyotes and other pack animals, cats are individualistic and tend to strike out on their own. “They travel long distances, they have large home ranges, they go to really interesting places and do interesting things,” said Hickling.
Carroll tries not to anthropomorphize too much but conceded that bobcats “really do capture the imagination.” Watching mothers overwhelmed by their kittens, “you can just tell how exasperated they always look, like, ‘Oh my God, I’m ready for a break.’” One of Carroll’s favorites is a small and “scrunkly” older female named Owl, who likely can’t see or hear very well and “hangs out in people’s yards and just stares at them,” she said.
Bobcats may not be as iconic as cougars, but they can be just as elusive, which adds to the thrill of seeing one.
Reader Richard Butler, of Pittsfield, recently shared a photo that I love of a lean and muscular bobcat creeping through high grass. He took the picture at the start of the pandemic in spring 2020, when many people were stuck at home and seeing wildlife they might not have otherwise encountered.
Butler had been hoping to revisit some breeding osprey and was walking on a path along the Housatonic River with his camera when the large cat poked its head out of the grass to look around. “It did not jump, it did not sprint. It just went into that low walk right across the trail,” he said.
“I was just astonished.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.